Unintelligent Design - A Marine Amphibian With an Evolutionary Past - 237 MIllion Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-assisted rendering of Gerrothorax maritumus, informed by newly discovered fossil evidence of the creature, which is the first fully marine amphibian on record. AI was used to adjust lighting, brightness, fish skin and amphibian skin.

Chen Geng/Guizhou University

New fossil evidence reveals the first fully marine amphibian, Gerrothorax maritimus, which dates to the Late Triassic period nearly 237 million years ago. The animal had a flattened body that was covered in bony armor, a potential defense mechanism against predators like ichthyosaurs.

Credit: Ryosuke Motani, UC Davis.

Researchers Unearth Fossil Evidence of First Fully Marine Amphibian | UC Davis

Why would an omniscient designer give an animal the inherited anatomy of a four-limbed vertebrate, then adapt that anatomy for life on the seabed? Evolution has a straightforward explanation: descendants inherit structures from their ancestors, and natural selection modifies what is already available. An unrestricted designer, supposedly capable of anticipating every requirement, has no comparable constraint. Yet nature repeatedly presents us with organisms whose bodies make sense as products of history.

A newly described amphibian adds another intriguing example. According to research, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Gerrothorax maritimus, an armoured amphibian that lived approximately 237 million years ago, presents evidence for a fully marine existence in a group whose living representatives have no equivalent ocean-going species.

The evidence includes two remarkably complete skeletons from Guizhou Province, China, marine sediments deposited far from major land masses, and strontium isotope proportions consistent with Triassic seawater. Together, these observations support an animal that inhabited the sea, rather than a freshwater carcass that happened to wash into it.

Creationism in Crisis - Yet Another Of Those 'Non-Existent' Transitional Fossils - From 165 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Sinojapyx giganteus.

Jie Sun.

Palaeoecological reconstruction of Sinojapyx giganteus.

Jie Sun.

Jurassic Giant Dipluran Reveals the evolution of Hexapods---- Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology Chinese Academy of Sciences

Another of those transitional forms that creationists insist are missing, has turned up in the fossil record — this time in the shape of a Jurassic relative of insects with an informative combination of ancestral mouthparts and developing tail pincers. Named Sinojapyx giganteus, it lived approximately 165 million years ago, presenting young-Earth creationism with two familiar problems: evidence of evolutionary transition and a chronology irreconcilable with a literal reading of Genesis.

The discovery, described in a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B is a fossil from the Middle Jurassic Daohugou deposits of Inner Mongolia, China. More than five centimetres long, it is the oldest confirmed dipluran and the largest fossil representative yet described. Diplurans, sometimes called two-pronged bristletails, are six-legged relatives of insects, rather than insects themselves.

Its evolutionary significance lies in the details. Living diplurans have mouthparts enclosed within the head, but those of Sinojapyx were exposed. Its paired rear appendages, known as cerci, were already pincer-like, yet remained symmetrical and lacked the small teeth characteristic of the more specialised pincers of modern japygoids. The researchers place it on the stem lineage of this living group and interpret its cerci as an intermediate condition in the evolution of sensory appendages into specialised grasping weapons.

This is what a transitional fossil actually looks like: a functioning animal with a mixture of ancestral and derived characteristics. It does not need to be an implausible hybrid of two modern species, nor must palaeontologists demonstrate that this particular species was the direct ancestor of a living one. Its significance is that it preserves an anatomical combination which helps reconstruct how later specialisations evolved. Dismissing it as “still a dipluran” would miss the point entirely: evolution within a lineage does not require its descendants to cease belonging to that lineage.

Refuting Creationism - Closing The Gap - Life In The Early Ediacaran - 600 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Macrofossils from the Doushantuo formation at Ancangping. A–F: Ribbon-shaped vendotaenids. G: Conotubular Protoconites minor H: Balloon-shaped Longfengshania. I: Tangled filaments similar to Zunyiphyton.

Ye, Q., An, Z., Chen, S. et al (2026)

Microfossils from the Ancangping assemblage. A: Schizofusa zangwenlongii. B, C: Ericiasphaera magna (C is enlarged view of rectangle in B). D, E: Appendisphaera anguina. (E is enlarged view of rectangle in D). F: Eotylotopalla strobilata. G: Eotylotopalla quadrata. H: Megasphaera ornata. I: Sinosphaera asteriformis. J, K: Tanarium cuspidatum. (K is enlarged view of rectangle in J).

Credit: Ye, Q., An, Z., Chen, S. et al (2026)

Tiny fossils reveal a missing chapter of ocean life after Snowball Earth

More than 600 million years before the supposed creation of Earth in a literal reading of Genesis, marine communities were already living through the aftermath of a planetary ice age. Their fossilised remains now provide another inconvenient glimpse of the immense history that young-Earth creationism requires its followers to dismiss. This was a world with an evolutionary past of its own, long before the appearance of familiar animals, let alone humans and their origin myths.

A study by Qin Ye of the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan and colleagues, published in Communications Biology, describes an assemblage of microscopic and larger fossils from Ancangping in Hubei province, South China. The researchers identified 35 species of organic-walled microfossils known as acritarchs, together with six broad forms of macroscopic fossils. Preserved together, these remains provide an unusually useful window into communities that included both organisms living in the water column and algae growing on the seabed.

The assemblage is provisionally dated to approximately 620–610 million years ago. That places it around 15–25 million years after the end of the Marinoan glaciation, one of the extreme climatic episodes associated with “Snowball Earth”, when ice extended into tropical latitudes. “After” therefore needs to be understood on a geological timescale: even the interval between the thaw and these organisms exceeds the entire young-Earth creationist chronology many thousands of times over.

Refuting Creationism - A Peculiar Belemnite From Wyoming - 160 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated impression of Wyoteuthis linsterorum in the Sundance Sea

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Artists impression of Wyoteuthis linsterorum

Jasom C Poole.

“Peculiar” new species of Jurassic squid found in Wyoming

Some 160 million years ago, a peculiar, thick-bodied relative of modern squid inhabited the sea that covered parts of what is now Wyoming. That alone places it inconveniently far outside the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. Now, two rare fossils have revealed that this animal was also a late-surviving representative of an ancient belemnite lineage — another small but revealing piece of an evolutionary history that creationism requires its followers to deny.

The newly described species, Wyoteuthis linsterorum, is the subject of a paper in Papers in Palaeontology. Although the headline calls it a Jurassic squid, it was a belemnite: a member of an extinct group of squid-like cephalopods. Its most striking feature was its exceptionally broad internal shell component, known as the rostrum or guard. Where familiar belemnite guards resemble slender bullets, these specimens are unusually stout, earning their owner the distinction of having the thickest known belemnite guards.

The fossils come from the Sundance Formation and date to the Oxfordian stage of the Late Jurassic. Examination of their external features and CT scans of their interiors led the researchers to assign the animal to the Megateuthididae, a family that had largely disappeared earlier in the Jurassic. Rather than representing a newly created form appearing from nowhere, Wyoteuthis appears to have been a surviving offshoot of an older evolutionary lineage, persisting in a regional refuge after its relatives had declined elsewhere.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronological problem is straightforward. An animal living approximately 160 million years ago cannot be accommodated within a universe supposedly created just 6,000–10,000 years ago. Nor does calling its remains a product of Noah’s Flood explain away the geological succession in which they occur. The problem is not merely the existence of a marine fossil on dry land, but its place within an ordered history of changing environments and successive assemblages of organisms.

Refuting Creationism - Yet Another of Those 'Non-Existent' Transitional Fossils - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Life reconstruction of the Late Jurassic bird Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis.

Image by Chung-Tat Cheung

Life reconstruction of the Late Jurassic bird Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis.

Image by Chung-Tat Cheung

Not All Early Birds Evolved Toward Better Flight, Jurassic Fossil Suggests----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Creationists who insist that there are no transitional fossils might wish that palaeontologists would stop finding animals that refuse to respect their imaginary boundaries. A newly described Jurassic bird from China is another such inconvenience: an evolutionary mosaic combining bird-like features with conspicuously dinosaurian anatomy. And, to compound the difficulty for Bible literalists, it lived approximately 150 million years ago — long before their supposed ‘Creation Week’.

The animal, Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, discovered in the Late Jurassic Zhenghe Fauna of Fujian Province, is described in a paper published in Nature. This crow-sized animal possessed bird-like pelvic and hindlimb features alongside serrated teeth and a hyperextensible second toe bearing a sickle-shaped claw — a combination reminiscent of its close dinosaurian relatives.

Its unusually short forelimbs provide another intriguing part of the story. Analyses of its limb proportions strongly support a terrestrial, flightless lifestyle, despite its placement within Avialae, the evolutionary group containing living birds and their closest extinct relatives. The researchers interpret it as evidence of exceptionally early flight loss. That interpretation necessarily involves reconstructing ancestral capabilities: the fossil provides anatomical evidence about how this animal lived, rather than a direct record of either its behaviour or its ancestors’ flight.

This matters because evolution has no destination. Early birds were not obliged to become progressively better flying machines, any more than every mammalian lineage was obliged to become a bat. Natural selection favours traits according to their consequences in particular environments; it does not work towards a predetermined ideal. A lineage exploiting opportunities on the ground could follow a different evolutionary course from one increasingly dependent on flight.

Creationism Refuted - How Archaeopteryx Was Able To Fly - 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated depiction of Archaeopteryx soaring about dinosaurs

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An illustration of Archaeopteryx

Mark Witton.

How the ‘first bird’ leapt into the sky and soared above the dinosaurs

About 150 million years ago, a small, feathered dinosaur was negotiating one of the most consequential transitions in vertebrate evolution: getting airborne and remaining there under its own power. Archaeopteryx, with its feathered wings, toothed jaws, clawed fingers and long, bony tail, combined features that creationists prefer to imagine belong in separate, independently created categories. It also lived almost 150 million years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. Both its anatomy and its antiquity present awkward problems for anyone trying to compress the history of life into a literal reading of Genesis.

Now, a paper in Developmental Biology, by Erik A. Meilak and colleagues, addresses a particularly interesting question: how could an animal with a less specialised flight apparatus than that of modern birds get off the ground? Their modelling suggests that powerful hindlimbs could have supplied the answer. A succession of forward leaps, potentially assisted by a wingbeat between jumps, could have built up sufficient speed for flapping flight.

For a modelled Archaeopteryx weighing about 400 grams, the researchers calculated that three leaps using both legs, or two with an intervening downward wingbeat, could have brought it to a sustainable flight speed of approximately seven metres per second. This provides a plausible route into the air without requiring the powerful, explosive take-off of many living birds. It is a proposed biomechanical solution, rather than direct evidence of an observed Jurassic behaviour, but it makes a specific evolutionary possibility testable.

That distinction matters because evolution does not require a modern bird’s entire flight apparatus to appear in one miraculous event. Existing structures can acquire additional functions, and useful intermediate combinations can precede the more specialised arrangements found in descendants. Legs already capable of propelling an animal across the ground could also launch it into the air; feathered forelimbs could contribute to that movement before acquiring all the refinements of modern wings. No foresight is required, only advantages available to the animal at the time.

Nor does describing Archaeopteryx as transitional mean it was an unfinished creature waiting for evolution to complete it. It was an animal in its own right, with a revealing combination of ancestral and derived features. Birds are themselves theropod dinosaurs, so the transition concerns the emergence of avian specialisations within the dinosaur lineage, not a magical crossing between unrelated ‘kinds’. Calling Archaeopteryx “just a bird” does nothing to explain away its dinosaurian anatomy or its position in evolutionary history.

The study does not settle every question about the origin of flight, and it need not do so to expose the weakness of the creationist alternative. Science can investigate how a transitional animal functioned, compare competing explanations and refine its conclusions. A literal Genesis chronology cannot even accommodate the time in which that animal lived. In the following article, reproduced from The Conversation, co-author Neil J. Gostling explains how the research brings us closer to understanding the steps — or, in this case, leaps — by which early birds took to the air. His article is reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism In Crisis - A Jurassic Crocodile With Needle Teeth - 170 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated impression of Ctenosuchus tenuidens hunting.

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An artist’s restoration of Ctenosuchus tenuidens.

Artwork by Nathan Dehaut.

New species of Jurassic crocodile had unusually slender teeth | University of Portsmouth

Some 170 million years ago, in the rivers and lakes of what is now Morocco, a crocodile relative was exploiting a feeding niche very different from that of the large-prey predators familiar today. Named Ctenosuchus tenuidens, it had a long, narrow snout armed with exceptionally slender, closely spaced teeth. For young-Earth creationists, its existence presents the familiar chronological problem: an animal was living, feeding and participating in a complex ecosystem more than 169 million years before their preferred biblical chronology allows Earth itself to have existed.

The discovery is described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Hamzah Imran of the School of the Environment and Life Sciences, University of Portsmouth, and colleagues. The animal belonged to the thalattosuchians, an extinct group of crocodile relatives. Its delicate dentition suggests a diet of small aquatic prey, such as tiny fish, shrimps and worms, rather than large, struggling animals capable of breaking those fine teeth.

This makes the fossil particularly informative about evolutionary specialisation. Teeth are not simply more or less effective in some universal sense: their usefulness depends on what an animal eats and how it feeds. A robust tooth suited to restraining substantial prey and a fine tooth suited to retaining small organisms represent different solutions to different ecological problems. An adaptation can therefore open up one feeding opportunity while limiting another. Evolution produces such compromises because natural selection favours reproductive success under particular conditions, rather than engineering an organism that excels at everything.

Creationism In Crisis - How Breast Feeding Evolved - 165 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

Fossil skeleton of Megacauda sungei

University of Chicago

Professor Peishu Li coauthors Nature study uncovering ancient origins of mammalian suckling and swallowing

Some 165 million years before creationists imagine Earth existed, an aquatic relative of modern mammals was already carrying anatomical equipment associated with one of our most characteristic abilities: suckling milk. A newly described fossil from Inner Mongolia, China, adds another inconvenient chapter to the evolutionary history that young-Earth creationism insists never happened. Its significance extends beyond its age, however. It also preserves a revealing combination of ancestral and more modern features — precisely the sort of transitional anatomy that creationists routinely claim is missing from the fossil record.

The animal, Megacauda sungei, is described in a new paper in Nature. It belonged to the docodonts, an extinct branch of mammaliaforms, the broader group encompassing mammals and their closest extinct relatives. Living approximately 168–163 million years ago, it had a broad, flattened tail, swimming adaptations and specialised teeth suited to an animal diet. It was a functioning, specialised inhabitant of Jurassic freshwater environments, with an evolutionary history written into its anatomy.

Particularly informative are small bony projections near the back of the palate and specialised throat bones. In living mammals, comparable structures support the muscles and soft tissues involved in swallowing and suckling. Their presence in Megacauda suggests that important components of this feeding apparatus had already evolved by the Middle Jurassic. This does not mean that the fossil identifies the first animal to produce milk, or preserves a youngster caught feeding. The inference concerns the anatomical machinery that made mammal-like suckling and swallowing possible.

Refuting Creationism - More Problems for Creationists As Science Reveals Yet More Evidence Falsifying The Bible Creation Myth

Ediacaran sea floor, Namibia, 543 Millian Years Ago

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Ediacaran sea floor, Namibia, Southwest Africa, 543 million years ago.

Credit: Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford / Mighty Fossils.

New study suggests animals may have evolved vastly earlier than fossil evidence suggests | Oxford University

One of the strengths of science is that its conclusions remain open to revision. An assumption that once appeared reasonable can be tested against new evidence, found wanting, and replaced with something better. For creationists, who frequently portray such revisions as evidence that science cannot be trusted, this must seem a peculiar way of acquiring knowledge. Yet it is precisely how science improves its understanding: by allowing the evidence to correct the explanation, rather than requiring the evidence to conform to a predetermined answer.

A new study published in Science Advances provides another example. Researchers have challenged an assumption used in some recent estimates of when animals originated. Their analyses support an origin approximately 700–800 million years ago, potentially extending animal evolutionary history by around 200 million years beyond estimates based on a younger maximum-age constraint.

The issue is a deceptively simple one: if a fossil deposit preserves microscopic organisms in exquisite detail, but contains no definite animals, does that mean animals had not yet evolved? Some researchers have used the approximately 590-million-year-old Weng’an Biota of China in this way, reasoning that animals would have been preserved there had they existed. Its lack of unequivocal animal fossils has therefore helped set a proposed upper age limit for animal origins.

The new research exposes a difficulty with that reasoning. The younger Kheseen Biota of Mongolia also preserves exceptionally detailed microfossils, yet none can confidently be identified as animals. In this case, however, animals are known from other deposits of comparable age. Their absence from Kheseen therefore cannot demonstrate their absence from the world. Particular environments and conditions of fossilisation can leave animals out of the record, even when other organisms are beautifully preserved.

This matters because molecular clocks — methods that use genetic differences between living organisms to estimate when their ancestors diverged — require calibration against geological and fossil evidence. Change an unjustified age constraint, and the resulting estimates can change substantially. Using alternative constraints from older deposits, the researchers recovered a much earlier possible origin for animals. They have not discovered an 800-million-year-old animal, nor established a final date for the animal kingdom’s beginnings. They have shown why one argument for restricting those beginnings to a much later interval is unreliable.

For young-Earth creationism, neither chronology offers any comfort. The debate concerns events hundreds of millions of years ago, not whether animal history can be squeezed into the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. Uncertainty over precisely when animals originated does not make every proposed date equally credible, any more than uncertainty over a mountain’s exact height makes it plausibly a molehill.

Refuting Creationism - Self-Correcting Science Finds Another Transitional Fossil

AI-generated reconstruction of Westlothiana lizziae.

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A reconstruction of Westlothiana based on x-ray scans of the fossil.

Famous "First Reptile" Fossil Wasn’t a Reptile After All | AMNH

One of the supposed earliest reptiles has lost its place in the reptile family tree — and, in doing so, has provided a revealing example of how evolution works and how science improves its understanding of it. For creationists hoping that a revised classification means evolutionary biology is collapsing, the disappointment is twofold: the fossil remains approximately 345 million years old, and its newly revealed anatomy makes the transition towards life on land more interesting, not less evident.

The animal is Westlothiana lizziae, affectionately known as “Lizzie”, a small, superficially lizard-like vertebrate discovered in Scotland in 1984. Its limbs and apparently clawed digits helped establish its reputation as an early representative of the evolutionary transition towards amniotes — the group encompassing mammals and reptiles, including birds. However, interpreting a crushed fossil from its exposed surfaces has limitations. Structures hidden inside the rock can tell a different story, as researchers have now demonstrated using powerful X-ray scans at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.

The two slabs of NSM G.1990.72.1, the Westlothiana fossil studied by this new research.

Photo by Roger Benson.

The research, published on 30 September in Nature reveals an unexpected combination: a skull retaining ancient anatomical features, bony supports for internal gills, and a mouth bearing thousands of tiny teeth. These are indications of an aquatic or amphibious animal. The researchers place Westlothiana among stem tetrapods, on an evolutionary branch outside the group comprising living amphibians and amniotes and their last common ancestor.

Yet Lizzie also possessed five-digit feet and superficially claw-like finger and toe bones. That combination is the significant point. Features associated with terrestrial vertebrates were already appearing in animals that retained substantial adaptations to life in water. This is an example of mosaic evolution: different parts of the body change at different rates, producing combinations that do not fit the tidy categories we recognise among living animals. It also means that claw-like impressions in ancient trackways cannot, by themselves, establish that the animals making them were early amniotes.

Why Science Works - And Creationism Fails - A Fossil From Mongolia Changes Scientific Minds, But Creationists Will Just Ignore It

AI-generated impression of life in the Cretaceous Gobi. The mammal in the foreground is a generalised small mammal, not Tamirkhan balcarceli, for whom there is insufficient data for a reconstruction

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Field photos of the Khugenetsavkhlant badlands in the Eastern Gobi Desert of Mongolia today, where Tamirkhan balcarceli was discovered.

Michael Novacek/© AMNH

Gobi Fossil Reshapes the Mammal Family Tree | AMNH

One of the most revealing differences between science and creationism is what happens when new evidence challenges an established explanation. In science, that is an opportunity to improve our understanding. In creationism, where the conclusion has already been declared unquestionable, it becomes a problem to explain away. A remarkable fossil from Mongolia’s Gobi Desert provides a particularly instructive example: a small mammal whose combination of teeth, skull and limb bones has prompted scientists to reconsider an enduring hypothesis about mammalian evolution. Predictably, there is no comfort here for anyone hoping that revising an evolutionary family tree means abandoning evolution.

The animal, Tamirkhan balcarceli, is described in a paper in Nature by Andres Giallombardo and colleagues. Discovered in 2004, the exceptionally informative specimen preserves a skull and part of a hind limb. This provides something researchers had previously lacked for the enigmatic mammals known as zhelestids: teeth and substantial skeletal remains belonging to the same individual.

Until now, zhelestids were known principally from teeth and fragmentary jaws. Their relatively low, rounded molar cusps resembled those of plant-eating hoofed placental mammals, encouraging suggestions that they represented an early radiation of placentals during the Cretaceous. The new fossil tests that interpretation against a much broader sample of anatomy. Its zhelestid-like molars occur alongside distinctive incisors, skull structures and hindlimb features characteristic of another ancient mammalian group, the zalambdalestoids. The researchers conclude that zhelestids belong within that group. Their apparently revealing resemblance to later herbivorous placentals arose through convergent evolution.

The significance extends beyond moving a name from one branch of a family tree to another. Identifying which ancient mammals belong within the placental radiation helps establish when that radiation began and how its early members diversified. An animal can possess teeth resembling those of a later group without belonging to that group: similar feeding demands can favour similar dental adaptations in separate evolutionary lineages. More complete fossils allow researchers to distinguish those similarities from the wider anatomical evidence of ancestry. This discovery therefore changes how an important set of Cretaceous fossils contributes to the history of placental origins; it does not, by itself, settle every question about their timing.

For young-Earth creationists, the chronological problem remains as severe as ever. This is a Late Cretaceous mammal, part of a world that existed tens of millions of years before the few thousand years into which they attempt to compress the history of Earth and its inhabitants. Revising its evolutionary relationships does nothing to bring that world within the biblical timetable. Nor does a previously mistaken interpretation of its teeth supply evidence for separately created “kinds”. To establish that claim would require positive evidence of separate creation, not merely the discovery that one proposed relationship needs correction.

Creationism Refuted - Bats Evolved In Europe - 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study reveals bats originated in Europe and rewrites the bat family tree | University of St Andrews news

Corynorhinus townsendii.

Credit: Elizabeth Clare.

Bats present creationists with a multitude of problems: firstly, there is the fact that they have a vastly more effective immune system than humans, so creationists need to explain why an omnibenevolent creator god would not give his favourite special creation, humans, the best available immune system. Secondly, there is the famous Bible blunder where, in most English language translations, bats appear to have been classified as birds (Leviticus 11:13-19) by the ignorant people who wrote it.

Now the facts have become even more difficult in the form of an awkward combination: remarkable adaptations that invite declarations of “design”, and an evolutionary history that researchers can investigate using evidence. Calling a bat a specially created “kind” explains neither its relationships with other bats nor when and where those relationships arose. Those are questions that require fossils, genomes and testable hypotheses.

Now, a major international study, published in Nature, has brought these questions into sharper focus. Researchers working within the Bat1K consortium assembled genomic data from 103 species, representing all 21 recognised living bat families, and combined this resource with anatomical evidence from 44 fossil bats. The university summarises their findings as pointing to a European origin for bats and mammalian powered flight around 65 million years ago — tens of millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week” of young-Earth creationism.

The research reconstructs a branching history of ancestry, migration and diversification. Its geographical model favours Europe as the ancestral region, followed by dispersal into Africa and subsequent expansion into other continents. These are historical inferences that can be tested and revised as further evidence becomes available.

The study also sheds light on echolocation: the ability to use returning echoes to detect surroundings and prey. The inferred position of the extinct bat Vielasia supports the conclusion that laryngeal echolocation — using calls generated in the voice box — arose before the diversification of the group containing all living bats. This places another celebrated bat adaptation deep within their evolutionary history.

Refuting Creationism - A Star Is Born - And Rewrites The Story Of The Origin Of Starfish

AI-generate impression of Yujingia glutenotunica.
(Colours and aspects of its living appearance are speculative)

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Artist's impression of Yujingia glutenotunica

Credit: Kaiyue He, et al

A star is born: half billion-year-old fossil rewrites the origin story of starfish | University of Cambridge

One of creationism’s favourite misrepresentations of the fossil record, promulgated By Stephen S. Mayer of the Discovery Institute, is that the Cambrian ‘explosion’ was a sudden creation event, when the major animal groups appeared without evolutionary ancestors, already equipped with their modern body plans. This depends on treating ‘rapid’ in the geological sense as ‘instantaneous’, and overlooking the transitional fossils that reveal how those body plans evolved. A newly described animal from China provides another awkward example for that narrative. And of course the existence of transition fossils themselves are a major problem for creationists who insist that they don't exist because their creation myth can't accommodate them.

Named Yujingia glutenotunica, this small, soft-bodied creature lived approximately 518 million years ago. As described by Kaiyue He and colleagues in their paper in Current Biology, its combination of anatomical features places it close to the common ancestor of two groups that now look remarkably different: the echinoderms, including starfish and sea urchins, and the hemichordates, including acorn worms. Together, these constitute the animal group known as Ambulacraria.

The fossils preserve a digestive tract and feather-like feeding tentacles, together with another set of appendages that may have anchored the animal to the seabed. Crucially, Yujingia possessed an elaborate feeding apparatus without a mineralised skeleton. Its anatomy therefore supports the evolutionary interpretation that specialised feeding structures preceded some of the defining features of later echinoderms.
This is what makes transitional fossils so informative. They need not resemble an animal caught halfway through changing into a modern species, nor must they be demonstrably the direct ancestors of anything alive today. They preserve combinations of characteristics that help scientists reconstruct the order in which evolutionary changes occurred. A fully functioning animal can be transitional in its anatomy: ‘transitional’ describes its relationship to other forms, not an inability to survive until evolution has finished building it.

Creationism Refuted - Dino Dung Tells Us More Than The Bible's Ignorant Authors Ever Could

Artist's impression of a tyrannosaur preying on an ancient diving bird.

Credit: Andrey Atuchin

The fossil feather preserved in dinosaur poop.

Credit: O’Connor, et al. (2026))

A fossil feather preserved inside dinosaur poop could help explain why birds survived the mass extinction - Field Museum

Creationism’s problems with the fossil record now extend even to dinosaur droppings. A small piece of fossilised dung from Montana preserves evidence of a meal eaten some 66 million years ago — long before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. Within it are feathers that may help illuminate why some ancient birds disappeared while the ancestors of today’s birds survived. As, reported in Current Biology, researchers led by Field Museum palaeontologist Jingmai O’Connor, examining a coprolite — fossilised faeces — from the Hell Creek Formation found exceptionally preserved feathers alongside fish scales and bones belonging to a hesperornithiform, an extinct diving bird.

The feathers combine structures associated with waterproofing in modern aquatic birds with smaller, simpler, fuzzy body feathers. The researchers suggest that differences in insulation, feather replacement through moulting, or both might have influenced which bird lineages survived the cold conditions following the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact. Hesperornithiforms disappeared; the lineage containing all living birds survived. This remains a hypothesis, however: one coprolite cannot establish why entire groups became extinct. The distinction between the observed feathers and the proposed explanation is central to the Field Museum’s account of the findings.

For creationists, the difficulty goes beyond the date. This combination of ancestral and more derived features makes sense within an evolutionary family tree, in which different characteristics change at different rates. Evolution does not require every part of an animal to move together along some imaginary ladder from ‘primitive’ to ‘advanced’. Nor does an extinct bird need to be a direct ancestor of living species to preserve evidence of the evolutionary history they share. There is also a useful lesson here about adaptation. A feature that works adequately in one environment may become a liability when conditions change. Evolution has no foresight: natural selection cannot prepare organisms for an asteroid impact millions of years in the future. Survival depends on the circumstances organisms encounter and the characteristics they already possess, with chance also playing its part. What makes this discovery particularly telling is how an apparently unpromising object can yield evidence against which explanations can be tested. Scientists can investigate both the history of feathers and the unresolved details of extinction without invoking a designer. The uncertainty concerns which natural factors mattered most — and further fossils may help resolve it. Even a dinosaur’s discarded meal can contribute to that process.

Refuting Creationism - Norwegian Fossil Shows Complex Organisms - 560 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Charnia, one of the oldest 3D Ediacaran fossils found

Stratigraphic context of the Kommagnes Charnia specimen. A, photograph (facing north) of the eastern part of the cliff, with the site of the float block marked by a star. B, stratigraphic log of the left side of A, marking the stratigraphic range from which the float block could have originated.

From: Veenma, Y.P., et al. (2026)

One of the oldest known 3D animal fossils found in Norwegian sheep field | University of Cambridge

Creationists have a major problem with the so-called Cambrian Explosion, some 535 million years ago. On the one hand, they insist it was a sudden moment of creation in which multiple different body-plans were magically created without ancestry; on the other hand, they deny there was any history before 6,000-10,000 years ago. Clearly both views can't be right; However, both views can be wrong.

And for creationists of both camps, the Ediacaran presents and even bigger problem: not only did it precede the Cambrian, but it shows that complex body-plans had already evolved. This problem just got a lot more acute with the discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved fossil in a sheep field in Arctic Norway, in approximately 560 million year old rocks, of a fossils of Charnia, a branching, frond-like organism that lived during the Ediacaran Period, well before the Cambrian began. These organisms inhabited an ancient seabed hundreds of millions of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism.

As a paper published in Palaeontology by researchers led by Dr Yorick Veenma reports, this is the first confirmed fossil of Charnia to be found in Scandinavia. It was found alongside other Ediacaran fossils and is a rare three-dimensional specimen which preserves anatomical details normally obscured in flattened impression.

Despite its superficial resemblance to a fern, Charnia was no plant. It belonged to the rangeomorphs, an extinct group generally interpreted as early animals, although their precise relationships to living animal groups remain debated. We need not claim that Charnia was a direct ancestor of any particular Cambrian animal to appreciate its significance: large organisms with elaborate body structures already existed before the diversification that creationists so often misrepresent as an instantaneous act of creation.

Refuting Creationism - Eocene Footprints In Antarctica Trample Creationism In The Mud

Artist's impression of the small mammal that left its mark in Antarctica

Credit: Álvaro Medina

This is what the small mammal that left its mark in Antarctica might have looked like.

Credit: Álvaro Medina

First Terrestrial Mammal Footprint Discovered in Antarctica

Sometimes, a small footprint exposes an enormous problem for creationism. In this case, it is a partial impression preserved in approximately 55.5-million-year-old volcanic sediment on what is now King George Island, Antarctica. Its age alone places it far outside the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. But its setting tells an equally significant story: an Antarctic landscape capable of supporting terrestrial mammals, profoundly different from the frozen continent we know today.

The discovery, described by Héctor Mansilla-Vera and colleagues in Polar Biology, comprises a partial forefoot-and-hindfoot impression. The researchers interpret its maker as a small carnivorous mammal, possibly a sparassodont—an extinct relative of marsupials otherwise known from South America. That identification remains tentative: the incomplete trace cannot establish a particular species or confidently identify the group. Nevertheless, it records a mammal walking across an Antarctic substrate, providing evidence of its presence where it lived, rather than bones or teeth transported after death. Javier Gelfo’s account of the research explains both the interpretation and its limitations.

This animal inhabited a warmer, forested Antarctica that retained land connections with South America. Antarctica was already at high southern latitudes; its subsequent transformation cannot simply be explained as a warm continent drifting towards the pole. The larger story involves the breakup of Gondwana, the loss of connections between continents, changing ocean circulation and a changing atmosphere.

As tectonic movements opened and deepened southern ocean gateways, they altered the movement of water and heat around Antarctica. Falling atmospheric carbon dioxide also played a major role in the cooling that culminated in extensive Antarctic glaciation around 34 million years ago. Geography and climate interacted over geological time to transform the conditions under which life could survive. Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

The challenge to creationism is therefore more precise than simply showing that Earth has changed. Biblical literalists themselves invoke catastrophic change through their Flood narrative. What confronts them here is evidence belonging to a much longer, independently reconstructed history: continents separating, connections disappearing, climates shifting and ecosystems being transformed over tens of millions of years. An appeal to an originally “perfect” creation explains none of those details.

This tiny trace offers a glimpse of life on a planet whose geography and habitability have never been permanent fixtures. Understanding it requires geology, palaeontology and climate science working together—and the willingness to distinguish what the evidence demonstrates from what it merely suggests.

An account and discussion of this research by Antonio García was published in La Brújula Verde. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - Creationists Stung By Giant Scorpion - From 415 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Praearcturus gigas in a Devonian river

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Life reconstruction of Praearcturus gigas

© Franz Anthony

World’s largest scorpion revealed from 415-million-year-old fossils

Anyone attempting to reconcile Earth’s history with the creation myths in Genesis has another awkward fossil to explain: the remains of a scorpion that lived in Britain approximately 415 million years ago—more than 400 million years before the supposed biblical Creation Week.

The animal,Praearcturus gigas, inhabited the river channels and floodplains of what are now England and Wales during the Early Devonian Period. Although known only from fragmentary remains, its enormous pincers and body plates suggest that it may have approached a metre in length, making it the largest scorpion yet identified. One of its fossil claws is more than 15.9 centimetres long, while the preserved carapace is about 9.4 centimetres wide.

The fossils themselves are not a new discovery. Some were collected in the nineteenth century and have been held in the Natural History Museum’s collections for more than 150 years. First described in 1871,Praearcturus was originally classified as a giant isopod-like crustacean and was subsequently compared with several other arthropod groups. Its identity remained controversial because none of the known specimens preserves an entire animal, including the characteristic segmented tail and sting.

Now, as reported in Plaeontology, researchers from the Natural History Museum, the University of Manchester and Technological University Dublin have re-examined the specimens using detailed photography, anatomical comparisons and computed tomography. Features including its large claw-bearing pedipalps, the structure of its sternum and a stridulatory surface on one of its leg bases provide strong evidence that it was a true scorpion. The researchers also concluded that fossils previously namedBrontoscorpio anglicus andBennettarthra annwnensis probably belonged to the same species and should be treated as junior synonyms ofPraearcturus gigas.
Its age is established by its geological context. The specimens come from the St Maughans Formation of the Anglo-Welsh Basin, a sequence of river and floodplain deposits belonging to the Lochkovian Stage of the Early Devonian. Fossil spores place the relevant rocks within a recognised biological zone dated to approximately 415.8–412 million years ago. This was not the familiar green world of later geological periods: forests had not yet evolved, land plants were still small, and terrestrial ecosystems were only beginning to develop.

Creationism Refuted - Hominin Footprints - 1.4 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

One of the large, 1.4-million-year-old footprints that the team excavated.
A 6-inch (~15 cm) ruler is shown for scale.

© Kay Behrensmeyer

Reconstruction of Parathropus boisei from holotype specimen OH5

By Daderot - Own work, CC0, Link

Fossil footprints show large body size and group dynamics in 1.4-million-year-old human relatives | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

One of the more tangible problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that the rocks beneath our feet contain evidence of creatures that lived and died long before the supposed biblical “Creation Week”. Fossilised bones can sometimes appear remote and abstract, but footprints are different. They record a fleeting moment in the life of an individual: a foot pressed into soft mud, weight transferred forwards, toes lifted and another step taken. For a few seconds, an extinct relative of ours occupied that precise spot—and the impression it left can remain for more than a million years.

At GaJi10, on the eastern side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, researchers have now documented 21 hominin footprints made by at least eight individuals approximately 1.43 million years ago. The tracks occur alongside those of hippopotamuses, antelopes and other animals that crossed the same muddy lakeshore during the Early Pleistocene. Volcanic ash associated with the surrounding sediments allowed the track-bearing surface to be dated.

As an international research team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the footprints provide much more than evidence that hominins were present. Their shape and the pattern of movement recorded in them differ from the more modern-looking tracks attributed to contemporary Homo erectus. The researchers therefore consider them most likely to have been made by Paranthropus boisei—an extinct, bipedal cousin of our own lineage, best known from its enormous chewing teeth, powerful jaws and heavily built skull. The attribution is an inference from footprint anatomy and locomotion rather than an identification that can be made with absolute certainty.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's A Transitional Early Insect - From 324 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Palaeoecological reconstruction of the Carboniferous stem-insect Chosha praecursor

From: Tihelka, E., Vásquez, C., Engel, M.S. et al (32026)

Amphibious stem-insect rewrites the evolutionary history of insect terrestrialization---- Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology Chinese Academy of Sciences

A favourite creationist debating tactic is to point to a gap in the fossil record and pretend that the absence of a known transitional form is evidence that no transition occurred. When a suitable fossil is eventually found, the manoeuvre simply creates two smaller gaps on either side of it—or the fossil is arbitrarily declared to be “fully formed” and therefore not transitional. A simple trick which exposes the ignorance and disingenuity of creationism, is to ask them to describe exactly what they would expect a transition fossil to look like. They tend to abruptly break off the debate, because to answer it would violate two unwritten rules of creationism - never consider being wrong and never state what evidence would cause you to change your mind in case it's produced.

This 'god of the gaps' rhetorical game depends upon treating an inevitably incomplete geological record as though it ought to contain a specimen from every generation of every evolving lineage - something that if it were true, would be hard for science to explain, given what we know of the circumstances in which fossils are formed, which actually predicts that the record will be discontinuous.

The early history of insects has offered particularly fertile ground for this tactic. Molecular-clock studies indicate that hexapods diverged from aquatic crustacean relatives hundreds of millions of years ago, yet their small, delicate bodies were poorly suited to fossilisation, especially in the environments through which they were making the transition onto land. Consequently, there has been a conspicuous interval—the so-called “hexapod gap”—between the earliest evidence of hexapods and the abundance of unmistakable insects in later Carboniferous rocks.

Now, an international team led by Erik Tihelka and Chenyang Cai has described a remarkable fossil that helps to narrow that gap while illustrating how the familiar insect body plan was assembled. The approximately 324-million-year-old animal, named Chosha praecursor, came from the Late Mississippian Tesnus Formation of western Texas. Collected in 1985 and long misidentified as a juvenile crustacean, it remained in a museum collection until examination under cross-polarised light revealed anatomical details that had previously been almost invisible. The findings are reported in Nature.

Refuting Creationism - The Slow Evolution and Extinction Of African Megafauna - Over 23 Million Years

Modern African megafauna

A selection of extinct African megaherbivores

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Scarce emergence of new species drove the decline of African megaherbivores | Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales

Africa’s elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses are surviving representatives of a much richer assemblage of giant herbivores that once included such animals as Deinotherium, an elephant relative with downward-curving tusks, and the pig-like anthracotheres, relatives of modern hippopotamuses. These animals were not merely conspicuous members of their ecosystems. As “ecosystem engineers”, megaherbivores—here defined as herbivorous mammals weighing at least one tonne—alter vegetation, disperse seeds, open pathways, create water holes and redistribute nutrients.

Why so much of this diversity disappeared has usually been approached as a question of extinction. Large animals reproduce slowly, require extensive habitats and comparatively large quantities of food, so it seems intuitively reasonable to assume that they must have been especially vulnerable when climates and environments changed. Human hunting has also figured prominently in explanations of the much more recent global disappearance of large mammals.

But the diversity of any group depends upon two processes, not one. Extinction removes species, while speciation produces new ones. Even a lineage with a comparatively modest extinction rate will decline if its species disappear faster than evolutionary divergence can replace them. Conversely, a group can withstand relatively frequent extinctions if new species continue to arise sufficiently rapidly.

A new study published open access in Nature Communications. has now examined both sides of that evolutionary balance. Juan L. Cantalapiedra and colleagues analysed 3,327 African fossil occurrences representing 396 species of herbivorous mammals. Using neural-network models, they reconstructed changes in speciation and extinction over the past 23 million years while considering body size, tooth-crown height, evolutionary relationships and environmental change. Their results challenge the apparently obvious assumption that Africa’s largest herbivores declined because they were inherently more prone to extinction.

In fact, the models indicate that extinction rates were generally somewhat lower among the largest species. High-crowned teeth, which better withstand abrasive diets, were also associated with a reduced risk of extinction. The underlying problem for megaherbivores was that their already low speciation rates could not compensate for the species that were lost.

The imbalance developed over millions of years. As Africa became increasingly arid from about 7.2 million years ago, both speciation and extinction initially accelerated as changing vegetation and expanding open habitats reorganised its ungulate communities. Speciation then levelled off after about 3.6 million years, while extinction continued to rise and increased sharply with the beginning of the Pleistocene, about 2.58 million years ago. During the driest intervals, smaller herbivores generated new species at substantially higher rates, whereas speciation among megaherbivores was suppressed still further. The resulting decline was already well under way long before humans possessed the technology needed to hunt such enormous animals systematically.

This does not mean that humans played no part in the most recent losses, nor that climate alone explains every extinction. Rather, it places recent events within a much longer evolutionary history in which changing climate, declining ecosystem productivity, extinction and unequal rates of speciation gradually transformed the African fauna.